Saturday I was riding solo. (My husband said that makes the blog more boring, since we don’t get any extra dialog between us.)

Honestly I knew that I wouldn’t be out that long, but I wanted to hit this sale down the street from me that we hit last year. Maybe you remember it’s when I purchased two ’50s Mexican circle skirts.

Their sale (that they called the Designer Sale this year) didn’t start until 9:00, so I found a couple of sales starting in the 8:00 / 8:30 time frame and headed out.

The first one was huge. It might not look huge, but they continued to bring stuff out over the course of the next 45 minutes that I was at the sale. I made two separate purchases, just so I could take stuff to my car and get back for the next round of items coming out.

I liked the sign, since it looks more like “Yard Sate.”

The first thing I saw was this huge collection of dolls.

I don’t know a ton about dolls, but it was just 8:00 AM and all the dolls had been sold. I can only guess that the person that purchased these ended up getting a great deal.

This sale had a weird combination of items. I am not 100% sure how all of this came together. A mother and her 3 sons – I think?!?

Gay interest books, movies and magazines

Unicorn, D&D, role playing and gamer items

Architecture and landscape design books

Mom stuff

I took an amazing photo of some of the D & D items, but it didn’t come out -– I was sad about this, since it was pretty impressive. This Fantasies and Other Realities book might give you an idea.

I picked up this amazing unused ’70sStar Wars paint-by-numbers.

After feeling like I had spent way too much time at this sale, I headed to an 8:30 sale that was filled with little kid and baby stuff, but I did like how they had their sign placed.

OK, that was a total bust, so fingers crossed I could get over to the Designer Sale.

It didn’t look as large as last year and I had to stand around with Jewelry Guy for 10 minutes. This felt like a lifetime, but he did tell the woman next to him a great story. She mentioned to him that she remembers him scoring some great jewelry at the sale last year. He then launched into this story about how someone had been asking him to move his car. I remembered this happening as soon as he said it (we even wrote about it). Another woman had parked really badly and the ladies putting the sale on thought it was him. He went to move his car and set the bag of jewelry on the trunk of his car. He then drove away and lost all of it. After telling this story he then started trying to talk to me and I just didn’t know how to deal.

In the end I made a few purchases – love the huge calculator they were using to ring folks up.

Here are some recently unearthed old-time hunting photos from the estate sale last week. It seems like a stretch that these people would keep canning items covered with saran wrap for 25 years.

Maybe this is the couple that the letters that Jenny mentioned are about. We will never know.

When hunting and camping was all the rage and you needed to have your hair “set” each week, so you better keep it in a scarf. Long before Cabin Chic. It’s a wonder how they just got by with a nice wool jacket instead of the fancy base layers, digital equipment and camouflage.

I am amazed they didn’t take a photo of the deer strapped onto their truck.

Or maybe they did and I was just unable to find it while digging into piles of clothing mixed with mouse traps.

There were plenty of sales listed on Saturday! One of them was listed as a “digger estate sale” urging shoppers to bring gloves and be cautious. Those kinds of ads are always somehow alluring and repellent at the same time, so I put it on our list. I figured we’d hit a few sales in our neighborhood first, and noticed this ad:

Today, 4/27, I came across a yard sale that was not advertised. It is being run by an elderly lady who does not know computers and didn’t put up signs. Great stuff, very cheap, mostly vintage kitchen, glassware, dolls, etc. Lots of size 10 women’s shoes. I don’t know the exact address …

Sounds possibly good, right? The only thing was, it was the same block where this woman has a sale on a regular basis with nothing but overpriced antiques. She is not some kind of clueless sale newbie — she even has a full-on signboard that she puts on the corner that sucked us in many a time before we finally wised up. But this couldn’t be her … right? WRONG. I don’t know if this was her own scammy attempt at luring people in, or if someone really thought she needed the help. Either way, we sped away, off to a nearby sale in an alleyway. This cute sign greeted us as we walked in.

I would not say it quite lived up to that, but it was decent — lots of good new-ish books, priced at a quarter each. We each bought a few, and headed off to the next sale.

This one was at another familiar spot, but a good one — they used to have sales pretty regularly, and I think it’s been a few years now since we’ve hit one, but they usually have a nice selection of vintage furniture and household stuff. Plus, Meghan bought one of her all-time favorite lamps here (way back in the pre-blog era), so it has a special place in her heart.

This time we didn’t buy anything, although we were both sort of captivated by this rubber stamp wheel.

We then hit a sale that was still getting set up, but they let us take a peek. Meghan instantly spotted this item since she had once owned one. It’s a Car-Snac!

You know, to hang over the back seat and keep your car snacks handy. Pretty amazing, but not something I need to own. Neither was this gathering of little animals.

Meghan picked up this crazy plastic dog — it had blinky eyes, but they kept getting stuck with one up, one down. The woman kept saying how she knew she was going to regret selling it. Between that and the sticky eyes (probably combined with the existential question of whether one actually needs to own this, cute though it may be), Meghan decided to just walk away.

We drove over to the digger sale, which still had a big line despite having been open for over an hour! We decided to go get a snack and then circle back. On the way to the coffee shop, I got a text from Karl about the estate sale he was at, across town in a ritzy neighborhood. He said it was insane and we should get over there, so that’s exactly what we did. The house kind of looked like a castle.

We walked in, didn’t see Karl anywhere, and decided to head upstairs. Here’s the view from inside that turret-looking thing.

It seemed like there must have been a doctor or nurse in the family. We spotted this box filled with oodles of pens and pencils, many of them promotional items from pharmaceutical companies.

Then Meghan found this big pile of blood pressure cuffs.

But it wasn’t seeming that great — we wondered if it had really been worth it to drive across town. We headed back downstairs and found Karl. He was laughing about something with another shopper. It turned out to be … this.

I know we have said it before, but even after all these years of hitting hundreds of sales … there is always something we have never, I mean NEVER seen at a sale before. Speculite? The disposable light for vaginal illumination? WOW.

And possibly even more wow: this tie-tack, shaped like a Paragard IUD.

If you’re figuring there was a gynecologist in the house, I think you’re right. In the basement were a ton of books (most of them in fairly crustified condition), and a good amount of them dealt with sex. Mostly from a medical perspective, but there were a few other items, like these.

And by the way? It’s for real.

This item was also in the basement.

Back upstairs, I found Meghan excitely gathering a huge pile of Folio Society books. They were immaculate (some were still sealed) and were priced at $2 each — a steal! I helped her hunt around and we gathered up a few more. I also spotted this Milky Way box that had somehow manage to survive all these years. (The candy was long gone.)

Meghan had called her husband from the sale to see if he wanted some old license plates. I think he passed, possibly because he had apparently just purchased a fog machine at some other yard sale. (I can’t wait for their next barbecue.) From what he said we figured there might be more cool stuff there, and since it was on the way back to the digger sale we decided to check it out. On the way over I looked up their ad and noticed they’d listed several other items, including “Sleep apnea machine (barely used).” This is definitely an item that I really don’t think should be purchased at a yard sale.

When we got there, I didn’t see a sleep apnea machine. But I did see this “Image Maker Special Effects Projection Box.” (Maybe they were just really into small single-purpose machines?)

They also had a box of combs. But overall it was pretty boring.

On the way back to the digger sale we spotted this amazing sign! We turned.

In front of the sale there were three girls having a little picnic with bowls of pho. This did seem kind of awesome.

We didn’t buy anything here, but as we left we spotted their sign on the other end of the block. I’m not sure how they came up with this, but we laughed.

We pulled up to the digger sale well after eleven. There was still a line!

We only had to wait about ten minutes before going inside. The main floor was a little crusty, but didn’t really seem that bad. We quickly figured out that one of the former occupants must have been a painter.

Upstairs was a room that had been used as an art studio.

There were piles of stuff …

… and lots more paintings.

It was pretty disheveled. This doll in a cradle was all tucked in with an empty Grand Marnier box.

Back downstairs I stayed away from this crime scene room … I think they were just using the tape as a “keep out,” but after having been to a few sales in houses where bad things happened, you honestly never know.

We decided to take our chances with the basement. Despite all the warnings, the stairs were honestly not that bad.

But we nearly shrieked when we spotted a shelf full of jars of ancient jam … or something? They were only sealed with Saran Wrap and one of them was labeled “1986.”

Let me reiterate: improperly-sealed homemade preserves from 1986.

Now that might have been a crime scene waiting to happen.

The rest of the basement was crusty, but we’ve definitely seen much worse. Meghan found some vintage men’s shirts, most of which were shredded into ribbons, but she picked out a few that were more or less intact. She also grabbed some great old photos that’ll make their way into a separate blog post soon, and I found a stack of letters. I opened one of them and read something like: Dear (name), I honestly don’t know what to say to you. About us, I mean. It went on about the couple’s separation and what the problem was and whether they could work it out. Sometimes it can be fascinating to get a glimpse into someone’s personal life from long ago, but this just made me feel a little sad … I put it back in its envelope and left the stack. And moved onward to scope out the rest of the basement.

Then I dug into one box and found some grungy old tighty-whities. I decided it was time to stop digging.

We decided to call it a day … but close to home we spotted some signs for a sale we didn’t know about. They had a bunch of stuff out in the yard. Including an entire bed.

And some Twilight posters. C’mon, I’ll fight you for ’em!

Inside, I laughed at this Dancin’ Grannies videotape (especially placed next to Doin’ It Country Style).

Now, before anyone gets too excited, see that brownish area up in the top left part of the black and white one? It was moldy rot that had started to eat through all the places where where they had been folded (and then stored for the last forty-some-odd years). There was a lot more of it than you can really see in the picture … they were both trashed well beyond wearable or even displayable condition. Even so, it was a bit hard to leave them behind.

But on a brighter note, we hit quite a few sales and had a good day of it … it feels like yard sale season is really kicking in. Yeah!

Blogging on Thursday about sales on Saturday is my worst (lazy) pet-peeve. I forget half of the amusing things that happened. It makes me irritated with myself.

In good news, it was nice out and there were more than four sales listed. I don’t sleep in as a rule, but I would rather stay in PJ’s and drink coffee than head out in the rain for four sales.

Our first stop turned out to be a shabby-chic-I-owned-an-antique-space-that-failed sale.

I know that this style is sort of out, but it really wasn’t my thing even at the height of its popularity.

We did spot this cool portrait, but basically this sale was a giant bust.

Going in the completely opposite direction was our next sale. This was a combination of “guy sale” mixed with “hoarder sale.” There was a sign out front, but you couldn’t tell where the sale was. Is it in the house, or out back, or did you decide this morning to not have it…? We weren’t sure, but down the driveway we finally found it.

It was piles of stuff all over the place.

Then I spotted this awful stack of crap on his back porch.

That was enough for us to high-tail it out of there and then burst into laughter at how awkward the dude having the sale was. Jenny was making fun of me for saying that sale was “Bad News Bears” — my new go-to curse at work.

OK, palate cleansing — STAT!

Jenny told me the next sale was on Aurora. I am not sure if we have really talked much about this area, but it was the old highway and many motels popped up for the 1962 World’s Fair. Some parts are pretty run down and there are a few houses, but mostly older businesses and the motels are a bit more derelict. Here is a little spoof on the prostitution on Aurora Ave. a bit closer to downtown.

This guy had lived here for a long time.

Maybe alone, based on this sign leading into the basement.

When I started to head to the basement the woman running the sale called down, “We have a huge crowd coming down!” I replied back “Three doesn’t really make a crowd.” Once I was downstairs, it made a bit more sense. It was very crowded with tools.

The guy working the sale wanted to know if I wanted a white kitchen garbage bag for my purchases. “Um, no thanks.” This is when he showed me a pencil and said “If you see any of these pencils they are made with real lead.”

I saw a few choice items in the basement to make fun of.

I pulled down this amazing picture of a monkey wearing ice skates and flipping the bird. She gave that to me for free.

During this time Jenny was having some odd conversation about if a CD was for sale or not. I wanted to say “don’t listen to that guy, he is mentally challenged” but didn’t get an opportunity.

Jenny thought we should hit a sale claiming to have over 1,000 vintage sun glasses.

And he did, but it all seemed like hipster junk.

He did have this gem: the K-Tel Record Selector!

When I made some comment about it the 25-year old guy was like “Hey, bet you haven’t seen one of those before!” Um, yes I have, on TV when I was a kid. How old do you think I am?!?! They also made one for 8-tracks!

So, what did I buy? Fireworks! My husband was stoked when I arrived home that afternoon. Seattle doesn’t allow the sale of any real fireworks. You can purchase snakes or sparklers and that ends the items you can purchase.

A friend of my husband’s was there and told us to hit up a sale close by with tons of great vintage clothing. It didn’t have much of interest and what she did have was way overpriced. I am not sure what he thinks vintage is, but this isn’t it. Total bust!

The next sale had this really great flyer.

But when we went into the back yard it was like a demolishment sale. I am here for your yard sale, not to purchase your crappy old kitchen cabinets. For god’s sake go to the dump!

At this point we needed to pick a new area of town. Shake off this bad sale BS. But no such luck at our next sale. The house was extremely crusty. We were glad the sale was in the front yard and not inside. And all he really had was train collectables.

The guy kept saying “Ladies, you are going to come back. I don’t have anything out that you are going to want to buy yet.”

He did have this odd collection of religious items. The one that baffled me the most was the holy bible eraser. What sort of sick person gives that as a party favor? I mean when you use it you are erasing the bible!

Jenny also spotted this carefully preserved copy of the Globe.

In the car I had been asking Jenny how she picked out the blender she has. I want a new one, but not a crappy one and not one of the insane $300 blenders. I don’t need to blend that much.

At our next sale the woman had tons of stuff from Anthropologie, but she wanted the same price you could get when it hit the sale rack. She kept saying that she hadn’t worn this or that item. She said it so many times that I finally said “If it doesn’t have a tag on it, I am assuming you wore it.” All of a sudden Jenny says “Look, it’s my blender!” There it was, for a whopping $5 — SOLD. She told me she had never used that either, but it was kind of sticky.

Our next sale was a church rummage sale listed as Books, Items from Kenya, and Quilting. This sign led us to the sale.

I mean how complicated is it create a sale sign?? What this turned out to be was a sale that just had quilting items. The books? All about quilting. There was this dude scanning all the quilting books. So, we just did what Karl usually does and really loudly went “BOOP” and “BEEP” at him.

(Now, a side note to book scanners who occasionally like to stop by: I am sure there are a few highly valuable quilting books out there, but that isn’t an invitation for you to post about how great you are, because you use a scanner, K? Start your own blog. Thanks!)

We hit a few more sales. One of them had these raccoons.

Another had this awful-looking book.

The very last one we hit ended up being my allergist’s sale. This was just sort of odd, since I didn’t know who he was until he spoke to me. I only see him once a year and it was so out of context. I bored him about my allergies for about five minutes (which I am sure he loved) and he introduced me to his wife.

And at that point it was time to go home. We each purchased a couple of things, but not enough to even bother with a trunk shot.

Hard to believe, but today marks five whole years since we launched this blog. I think that’s practically middle-aged in Internet terms, though we seem to still be in the “bratty toddler” stage. There’s been joy, there’s been horrors, and there’s definitely been more crazy, weird, and occasionally cool junk than anyone probably ever needs to see.

Many heartfelt thanks to all our readers, old and new. Maybe you’d like to celebrate our blogaversary by watching our video?

Or maybe you’d like to take a gander at our staggering collection of junk-in-my-trunk photos. There are well over 100, which is sort of frightening, especially when you see them all in one place.

Then maybe you’d like to ask us what we do with all that stuff … eh, don’t do that, just read this instead.

Or just stay with us as we continue boldly onward in this bloggy adventure. Here’s to heaps of good scores for everyone! And plenty of crazy stuff to blog about. Based on the last five years, we feel pretty confident that there’s no shortage of that out there.

Some of you might remember that I had been in Australia last year for my honeymoon. I hadn’t really planned to thrift or even hit sales while I was there. One day at a coffee shop in Melbourne I did see this tiny sheet for a yard sale that had happened a couple of weeks before.

It really was that small and it does say “hello, stiffy” – yes, that is Aussie slang for “hey, everyone look” but it still means a male erection when you get right down to it.

It says nothing over $50, and if you know what the dollar is like there now -– that is still pretty high. My husband and I went into major monetary sticker shock the first few days.

This flyer is so small that I lost it in my wallet for about three months after I arrived back home. Still pretty funny.

Last Saturday was rainy and cold and there really weren’t many sales listed. I had seen ads for some kind of rummage sale at the Swedish Cultural Center so I figured that might be good. Later I noticed an ad for someone who had a table there and got the feeling it might be more like a one-day antique mall setup – but with not much else around I figured it might still be worth a shot.

As we walked in the woman at the door told us there was a suggested $3 donation and also tried to strong-arm us into coming back for “ABBA Night.”

True to what I had feared, the sale was mostly individual tables with higher-priced items for sale.

Meghan spotted these bottles that one woman had, including one marked “Lady Killer” — kind of awesome, but not $35 awesome.

I laughed at this license plate. Out of all the possible things to put there, someone chose “NETSRFR”? How did that ever seem like a good idea …

Even their baked goods were overpriced, so it was pretty much a bust. So we headed off to our next stop, an estate sale advertised as “weird and wonderful.” This can always just be hype, but one of the things they listed was a Lynda Barry “Poodle with a Mohawk” poster — I didn’t need to buy this, having purchased one of my own a few years ago at an estate sale that was definitely weird and wonderful (and HUGE), but I figured it was a good sign. When we got there, the poster had already been sold (the seller said it was also pretty beat-up). We looked around for a bit and each picked up a few books.

There really wasn’t much else going on unless we wanted to drive around town, and neither of us really did. We decided to hit an estate sale in our neighborhood that had started Friday, but seemed like it might be decent. On the way we spotted a sign for an unlisted sale! We detoured over and found a small open garage — mostly tools, plus a stack of 7″s, all mainstream hits of the early ’80s, like one brief window where someone got into buying records. I went inside and found this adorable Booze Hound.

I didn’t need to own him, but Meghan did! I was glad he found a good home. I did however purchase a baton for $1, based purely on the fact that Meghan and I had been reminiscing in the car just an hour before about both of us having taken baton twirling lessons when we were young. (Turns out I still have the moves! Well, a few of them.)

We saw signs for another sale … got there and saw a couple of signs in front, directing us to the basement.

I followed Meghan around the house to a cute little back yard and … no sign of a sale. Not at all. There was a door that possibly went to a basement, but it was closed and the place just seemed deserted. We didn’t quite have the nerve to knock. Later I checked the listing and realized it was a sale I’d deliberately passed over anyway — “retired electrician, lots of tools” — so maybe it was for the best.

And that last estate sale — there is not much to report. It might have been okay on Friday, but I doubt they had anything amazing. It was not even 10:30 when we decided to call it a day.

There were not a ton of sales last Saturday, but we were itching to go out after nearly a month’s hiatus. Karl even joined us, for the first time in ages – first regaling us with tales of an estate sale he hit on Friday, where he had to wait in line next to some douchebag wearing two pairs of sunglasses on his head and shadow-boxing. As we set out, he asked if we had seen the “sale lady” signs nearby – uh, what? They must have just been put up this morning – we followed them to a sale just a few blocks away.

We didn’t have a very good feeling when we pulled up.

Inside was not much better. Although they did have the Smooth Jazz cable music channel playing to set the mood.

We made an early snack run and then hit an outdoor sale where I don’t think anyone bought a thing.

Next was an estate sale. As soon as we walked in, there was Furniture Guy! Great. We moved into the back and there was Annoying Jewelry Guy. Both of them at one sale is really too much. Jewelry Guy was asking the seller questions and looked crestfallen when she mentioned she had kept the real gold pieces for herself. Meghan and I took a look through what he’d left behind and when she pointed out a charm that claimed to be from the “Olympic Sleeping Team” I had to grab it. (Later I noticed that there’s an extra “I” in OLYMIPIC. Not sure if that is incompetence or a half-hearted attempt at copyright avoidance.)

In another room, Meghan spotted another item with apparent Olympic credentials – this “Deep Heat Massager” had the Olympic Committee official selection seal of approval.

I am sure that Olympic athletes use this all the time. (Maybe just the competitive sleepers.)

The sale was pretty bad. Here is a representative sampling.

Meghan started looking through some record and asked the guy how much. He said fifteen dollars each! My neck craned around to see if he was actually high. We all sort of laughed at this and he tried to explain that if you went to a local record store they would charge more than that — you can imagine how well that went over. I thought he might charge me extra for my Sleeping Team charm just for snarking on his crazy prices, but he only asked for fifty cents. As we drove away, Meghan ranted about their crazy record prices, finally summing up the situation with this: “You are not a store. Stores don’t have olive green shag carpeting from the ’70s.”

Our next stop was something Meghan had seen signs for earlier in the week: a sale in the Whole Foods parking lot. I guess some employees had collected stuff to be sold as some kind of benefit. I kept making stupid comments about whether it was going to be getting real – Meghan did not have any idea what the hell I was talking about and I had to try and explain this video to her.

I would not exactly say that anything was getting real at this sale, but they did have a pretty decent spread.

Sure, some of it was promotional t-shirts for stuff like Amy’s Yogurt and Dave’s Killer Bread, but there was actually a lot of good stuff, and it was priced to move. Meghan filled up a bag, and we all ended up buying stuff. (Then we went inside to use their bathroom and get something to drink.)

We had debated going to a huge school rummage sale that happens every year – none of us really wanted to deal with what was probably going to be crowded and not all that fruitful (like the last time I went to that sale). Instead, we headed toward an estate sale that had started on Friday – usually we pass on these, but it sounded like it might still be worthy, or at least might be interesting for blogging purposes. It turned out that this was the same sale Karl had hit the day before, but he said it was probably worth a stop since it was a pretty schmancy spread.

We hit one yard sale first, where Karl purchased a $6 Le Creuset pan, and then headed to the estate sale – passing this truck covered in giant dayglo Legos on the way.

The house itself was super cute.

Inside, the first thing I noticed were these amazing portraits! They seemed to be looking at each other from across the room …

Here’s a close-up of the lady, plus a few others – there were tons of fancily-framed paintings (and repros) throughout the house.

They had a massive amount of stuff, even for being the second day. The spread really ranged from the very fancy, to the not-at-all fancy.

That last item was in a basement bathroom which had a working phone in it … I only know this because Karl used it to call me.

And last but not least: a musical Christmas tie. Meghan came rushing downstairs to show us this video — yes, she took a video of this insane thing.

They did have some great old magazines – 1930’s copies of Sunset and more – but like most things at this sale, they were super expensive. The prices were seriously deranged for the most part. I guess maybe on Sunday if things went half-price, some stuff might be worth it. Maybe. Meghan did pick up a few items but I left empty-handed.

A couple more quick stops with nothing too thrilling to report, and we were done for the day.